What is it?
That's the $64,000 question. On the surface, OneClick is dog simple: it ships on a floppy disk and the single Control Panel is only a few hundred kilobytes. The rest of the OneClick package is installed in the OneClick folder in your Preferences folder. OneClick doesn't seem to use much RAM or affect performance much (I used it on my 68040-based Powerbook 190cs just fine), though I haven't exactly done any scientific tests to prove anything one way or the other.

Once installed, however, OneClick seems to transform into dozens programs. There's the Launcher, the Task Bar, the System Bar, and many other floating palettes. What's going on? Didn't you install just one program?

That's the miracle of OneClick. With a single software program, you can do what traditionally requires dozens, or even hundreds of other programs. (Want a stable system? Install OneClick instead of so many extensions.)

OneClick uses Floating Palettes to do its dirty work. These are like toolbars -- each can be filled with buttons of your choosing. The buttons can do nearly anything you imagine. (If you aren't familiar with floating palettes, see What Are Floating Palettes?)

What Does it Do?
OneClick is billed as a macro program -- software that can memorize a sequence of actions and repeat them for you. Do you ever find yourself doing the same task over and over again? For example, the other day I had a whole folder of images that were TIFF and I needed to convert them to JPEG. I could do them manually, one by one. But wouldn't it be great if the computer could watch what I'm doing and repeat it?

That's where macro software is a lifesaver.

But many times macro software isn't enough. In fact, most of the time it isn't. Human tasks are rarely so generic that a non-thinking machine can just take over. Most of the time a repetitive task involves thinking -- making decisions based upon the current status of things.

For example, let's say I've got a folder full of JPEG files but my PC-using colleague needs them all named ".JPG" for his system. Now I could manually go through all those files and rename them, one by one. But that's tedious. That's exactly what the computer was meant to avoid.

OneClick to the rescue. Because OneClick is more than a simple macro player, it can actually analyze my files and rename them appropriately. That's right, using a simple OneClick script, I can tell it to find all JPEG files and rename them by adding ".JPG" at the end. That's power!

How does OneClick do something like that? Well, it's not magic. It takes programming. Yeah, OneClick has its own programming language called Easy Script. But unlike most products of the 90's, it lives up to its name.